ITHACA, N.Y. -- Three Cornell University faculty members are among the 213 new fellows elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in honor of their distinguished contributions to their professions.

The three Cornell honorees, to be inducted in October, are Gregory Lawler, professor of mathematics; Mars rover scientist Steven Squyres, Goldwin Smith Professor of Astronomy; and novelist Alison Lurie, F.J. Whiton Professor of American Literature Emerita.

Lawler specializes in probability, specifically Brownian motion random walks, with a particular emphasis on processes that arise in statistical physics. He joined the Cornell faculty in 2001 after 22 years at Duke University, where he rose to prominence in the field. Much of Lawler's work concerns random walks with self-avoidance constraints -- mathematical metaphors that describe movement processes in space where the length and direction of each step are random and must avoid entering the same place twice. Two such processes are the self-avoiding walk, which is a model for polymer chains, and the loop-erased random walk. Lawler has written four books and numerous articles. His latest book, "Conformally Invariant Processes in the Plane," focuses on his recent work with collaborators Oded Schramm and Wendelin Werner. A number of problems were solved by the trio, including a conjecture of Benoit Mandelbrot, the pioneer of fractal geometry. Lawler was one of the founders of the Electronic Journal of Probability, a highly regarded peer-reviewed journal in probability available free on the Web. He was a Sloan Fellow and is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. 

In his spare time, Lawler plays guitar and related stringed instruments in Svraka, a group that plays music from the Balkan region for international folk dance, and Mockin'bird, which plays tunes from the United States and the British Isles for contra dancing.

By now almost everyone within earshot of a news broadcast has heard of Squyres, the principal scientific investigator for NASA's Mars rover mission. In January 2004, "ABC News/World News Tonight" named Squyres "Person of the Week." In December 2004, Science magazine chose the discoveries of the MER mission as Breakthrough of the Year.

Squyres received his Ph.D from Cornell in 1981 and spent five years conducting postdoctoral research with NASA before joining the Cornell faculty in 1986. His research focuses on the large solid bodies of the solar system: the terrestrial planets and the satellites of the Jovian planets. His work involves analysis of data from both spacecraft and ground-based telescopes, as well as a variety of types of geophysical modeling. Areas of particular interest include the tectonics of Venus, the history of water on Mars and the geophysics of the icy satellites of the outer planets. Data analysis and theory are used together to examine the processes that have shaped the surfaces and interiors of these bodies.

Squyres has participated in a number of planetary spaceflight missions. From 1978 to 1981, he was an associate of the Voyager imaging science team, participating in analysis of imaging data from space probes of Jupiter and Saturn. He was a radar investigator on the Magellan mission to Venus, a member of the Mars Observer gamma-ray spectrometer flight investigation team and a co-investigator on the 1996 Russian Mars mission. He is a co-investigator on the Mars Express mission and on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment. He also is a member of the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer Flight Investigation Team for the Mars Odyssey mission and a member of the imaging team for the Cassini mission to Saturn.

Lurie is a widely celebrated novelist and winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for "Foreign Affairs," about the adventures of two American academics abroad. A graduate of Radcliffe College, she joined the Cornell faculty in 1968.

A revered teacher and academic, she is probably best known for her nine novels and book of short stories, which are full of shrewd psychological insights and often described as social satire. Lurie also has published a collection of ghost stories, "Women and Ghosts" (1994), a book on fashion, "The Language of Clothes" (1981), and a collection of essays on children's literature and folklore, "Don't Tell the Grownups" (1990).

Her first novel, "Love and Friendship," was written in 1962 and was followed in 1965 by "The Nowhere City." She became a household name with "The War Between the Tates" (1974), a story about a professor, his distressed wife and the graduate student he is having an affair with. The setting, a fictional Corinth University, bore an unsettling -- for some readers -- similarity to Cornell and caused a localized stir in its time. The novel was later adapted for NBC television.

"The Truth About Lorin Jones" (1989) won the Prix Femina -- Roman Etranger in France. The story follows the adventures of a biographer who is researching the life of a famous woman painter. Lurie's 10th novel, "Truth or Consequences," is due out in the fall of 2005.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which has more than 4,000 fellows and over 600 foreign honorary members, was founded in 1780 by John Adams, George Washington and James Bowdoin and is based in Cambridge, Mass.